A Clockless Synergistic Hybrid Energy Harvesting Technique With Simultaneous Energy Injection and Sampling for Piezoelectric and Photovoltaic Energy
Xiudeng Wang, Yinshui Xia, Ge Shi, Zhangming Zhu, Huakang Xia, Yidie Ye, Zhidong Chen, Libo Qian, Lianxi Liu
Abstract
In this paper, a mutually synergistic hybrid energy harvesting (SHEH) circuit with both AC and DC energy harvesting capability is proposed. Within the proposed hybrid harvester, the vibration period of the piezoelectric transducer (PZT) is served as the switching signal for photovoltaic (PV) energy harvesting so that a dedicated clock generator is saved. Meanwhile, during the sampling phase, a small portion of the PV energy is injected into the PZT as an investment, which enhances the damping force and charge extraction of the PZT. Theoretically, the total synergistically extracted power from the proposed hybrid harvester is more than the sum of the power obtained from each transducer independently. The proposed SHEH circuit is fabricated with a 0.18- <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> CMOS process. The buck-boost converter with zero-current switching control achieves a peak efficiency of 82.8%, and the maximum efficiency of piezoelectric energy harvesting can reach 4.5 times that of the full-bridge rectifier.